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“Hunting,” he said. “With me.”

I sat bolt upright. For as long as I could remember, I’d been begging my father to let me join him on one of his fabled hunting trips. Up until then the answer had always been “We’ll see,” and when I would wake up the morning of the trip, I’d find him already gone.

I jumped out of bed and hugged my father as hard as I could. I ran into my parents’ bedroom, where my mother was still asleep, and I woke her to tell her the good news. Finally, I was going with my father, uncles, and male cousins on a family hunting trip. I knew what this meant. This was more than just fluorescent orange vests and beer in a cooler. This invitation meant that—in my father’s eyes and in the eyes of my family—I was becoming a man.

When my father was a boy growing up in Crete, hunting wasn’t about sport. It was the difference between meat on the table and going without. To come home without some kind of catch meant that he would go hungry, and so would his family. By joining this hunt, I was about to cross a threshold, and I embraced the opportunity—and the responsibility.

My mother had already laid out hunting clothes for me. As my father carefully loaded an arsenal into the back of our wood-paneled station wagon, I scrambled to get dressed. I could hardly contain my excitement.

We started the drive north, first on local roads, then onto the highway. The whole drive couldn’t have taken more than a couple of hours, but to me even fifteen minutes seemed like an eternity. It was still pitch-dark outside, and I fell asleep in the back of the station wagon. When I awoke, Theio Jimmy and his son, my cousin Manoli, and Theio Antonios and his son, my cousin Teddy, and Theio Manousos were sitting in the vehicle too.

We arrived at our destination in the mountains of upstate New York and unloaded the guns. Every man took a weapon. My father told us all to line up in a row, four men and three boys, and we proceeded single file up a mountain. With this, as with most things in my life as it pertained to my father, there was an order to things—a rationale. We walked in a line so when someone was taking aim at an animal, a person would not inadvertently get caught in the line of fire. That line also determined the order in which we got a turn to shoot.

Buzzing with energy, I couldn’t stop chattering as we started uphill. My father kept hushing me until I was quiet. Then, still in a row, we marched in silence. A rabbit hopped into view. Theio Jimmy, first in line, took aim and missed. The next person, Theio Antonios, took a shot and killed the rabbit. When we reached the rabbit, it was dead and I felt… odd. This meat was not the antiseptic product from the grocery store, shrink-wrapped in a Styrofoam tray. This was an animal that had been alive moments before, hunted by me, my father, my cousins, and my uncles, just as game had been hunted by my father’s father and his father before him. And it was then that I realized, So, this is what I have to do to earn the privilege to come on these trips, to be here with my father.

We had a picnic breakfast in a clearing. All around us there were trees laden with bright red apples. As I bit into one, I thought, This is the best apple I’ve ever tasted. Whether that was a function of the freshness of the apple or the thrill of being allowed to join my father on a hunting trip, the taste was so pronounced that, to this day, I remember the sweet, crisp flesh of that apple in my mouth.

It was then that my father asked me if I was ready to shoot a gun. I had been waiting so long to have this chance that there was no hesitation when I shouted, “Yes!,” jumped up, and hurried to his side. He helped me position the rifle and pointed to a nearby tree.

“See that bird on the branch over there? Try to shoot it,” my father instructed.

I sighted along the barrel of the rifle and took aim, but I couldn’t pull the trigger by myself so one of the adults assisted me. The gun fired, and it was as if I’d been punched in the shoulder. I stumbled backward and fell on